“This guy,” he said. “He came up to me one day in the shipyard, and told me he heard that I sold herbal remedies. I do. I grow stuff in my yard, and I get supplements and rare herbs from overseas. People buy from me. It’s a thing I do on the side. Western medicine is so behind other cultures. We don’t know anything about the healing remedies Mother Earth has.”
I drew a deep breath. I grew up with this stuff. When I was sixteen, I snuck out and got drunk with friends and none of us wanted to go home. In the morning, we were all hungover, and someone passed out aspirins. I remember staring at the little while pill wondering what it would do to me. My household didn’t believe in aspirin. We believed in cannabis oil.
Tony went on like this for a little while and finally I cut him off.
“So,” I said. “You were approached by a guy. Who was this guy and what did he want?”
“He wanted to talk to me about healing remedies,” he said. “So he invited me to coffee. He wanted to go to...Starbucks. Who goes to Starbucks?”
He shuddered.
“Anyway,” he said. “So I met him at...Starbucks...and he talked to me for a long, long, time about different healing remedies and he really knew his stuff. I didn’t know why he wanted to talk to me at first, because it seemed like he knew everything there was to know.”
He had a puzzled look on his face as he recalled.
“Eventually,” Tony said, “I just stopped thinking he was going to be a customer, and decided maybe he was a supplier. Then, it got weird. He started asking me about dark stuff, like how long it takes poison to enter the bloodstream, and different poisons and how long it would take to stop a heart. Then, I thought maybe he wanted to kill me, and I stopped drinking my coffee. Which was fine because, ya know, Starbuck sucks. I buy from Jittters because I like to support local farmers, and their coffee is just better.”
“I agree with you on that part,” I said.
“Anyway,” he shrugged. “Eventually he asked me if I knew how to get this plant called borrachero. And that’s when I got scared. I know about that plant, and it’s fuuucked up.”
He whistled and shook his head. “Do you know about it?”
I hadn’t heard of it. “No,” I said. “What is it?”
“It’s also called devil’s breath,” he said, “because once you breath it in, it turns you into a zombie. It’s the freakiest ever. You have no control over your free will. People will tell you to give them money, and you will. People will tell you to sign over your house for free, and you will. It completely hypnotizes you. So, he asked me if I knew how to get it, and I told him I didn’t.”
“You didn’t get it for him?” I clarified.
“Fuck no,” he said. “There’s not much of it in the United States, but in some other countries, it’s an epidemic, and I didn’t want to be the one that introduced that plant to Sedona. It would be horrible.”
“So what did you do?” I asked.
“I told him I didn’t know how to get it,” he said. “And that was the end of it. But, then the night of the Sedona Nightlife taping, I heard Roy on the phone, arguing about buying extra trumpet mouthpieces. He got off the phone and was complaining about how whiny the guys in the band were, and how the trumpet player had lost his mouthpiece somehow. He had this special brand of trumpet and you could only buy stuff for it in Flagstaff. So, there wasn’t time for the trumpet player to go all the way to Flagstaff and back, they wanted Roy to do it. So, he went to Flagstaff and came back in time for the taping.”
Tony shrugged dismissively. “I didn’t think it was any big deal at the time. Being in a band is like that, whatever. But, I watched the show that night at my house, and the guy that wanted the Devil’s Breath plant, was in the band. And then as soon as the trumpet player started playing, he drops dead. And I remembered the missing mouthpiece.”
“You believe that the guy in the band put this borrachero plant on the mouthpiece?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “Because it’s not really introduced in the United States, it wouldn’t show up on an autopsy. He knew that. He wanted something rare and deadly.”
“So why would he switch out the mouthpieces?” I asked.
“I guess he stole the mouthpiece to give him time to poison it without getting caught,” he said, “and in the meantime, the trumpet player thought he lost it. And then, he waited for a chance to switch it back? I haven’t got it all worked out. But that guy poisoned the mouthpiece. I know he did.”
“Who was the guy?” I asked, even though I knew.
“His name was Gary,” he said. “That’s all I knew.”
AJ gasped when she heard the name. “Gary...Zimmerman?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I didn’t put it together until later. He’s from that Amish family.”
“They are not Amish,” Ana corrected him in a motherly tone. “They just live naturally.”
“They’re weird,” AJ stated definitively. “Why would a Zimmerman come to you for plant advice.”
“If he didn’t want to get caught,” Tony said. “He wouldn’t want to use plants that could be traced back to his family and their farms, so he pretended like he wanted my advice, and then asked me to get it for him. It wasn’t a bad idea.”
“Why didn’t you want to tell this to the FBI?” Vicki asked him. “You gave them the impression that you did it.”
“Because…” he sighed. “Mrs. Zimmerman is a
